Jazz Articles about Billie Holiday

like 163

Billie Holiday: Four Classic Albums Plus

by David Rickert
May 22, 2011

Billie HolidayFour Classic AlbumsAvid Records2011 Back in the 1950s, when the American people were buying television sets and driving gas guzzlers on brand new superhighways under the threat of nuclear war, singer Billie Holiday was still turning out fine performances on record and on stage, defying a lot of expectations raised by her wayward lifestyle. Holiday only had a few years left--she died in 1959--but continued performing right up to the ...

like 610

Billie Holiday: The Complete Commodore & Decca Masters

by George Kanzler
June 13, 2010

Billie HolidayThe Complete Commodore & Decca MastersVerve Music Group2010 In 1959, Nina Simone made a black-pride point about her hit single, “I Loves You Porgy," very publicly proclaiming that she refused to use the (to her) demeaning dialect pronunciation “loves," substituting “love." It was the same year that Billie Holiday died, but few remembered that Holiday had, without fanfare, simply sang “love" instead of “loves" in her exquisite 1948 recording of ...

like 486

Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday

by Ken Dryden
May 16, 2010

Billie Holiday Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday Naxos 2009

Billie Holiday has long been acknowledged as one of the greatest jazz vocalists of all time. With her extensive catalogue of recordings for several labels, Holiday's music has been readily accessible though relatively little live footage with audio is available. Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday integrates film and video performances, recordings, words from her controversial autobiography ...

like 853

Billie Holiday Fifty Years Later: A Tribute and Reassessment

by Victor L. Schermer
July 17, 2009

Fifty years ago, on July 17, 1959, Billie Holiday died an untimely death at age 44 in a New York hospital from complications of drug and alcohol dependency. Now, half a century after her passing, it is an appropriate hommage to reflect once again on her legacy as a singer, an African American woman, a victim-- of a traumatic childhood, spousal abuse, and substance dependence--and a powerful creative force for the times she lived in. Though less of a “pop ...

like 687

Becoming Billie Holiday

by Larry Reni Thomas
March 27, 2009

Becoming Billie Holiday Carole Boston Weatherford Hardcover; 120 pages ISBN: 159078507X Wordsong Press 2008

Award-winning poet and professor Carole Boston Weatherford's latest, excellent book, Becoming Billie Holiday--a fictional verse memoir, as Weatherford describes it--reaches out and grabs the reader's attention as if Holiday herself was on stage and her entire life was unfolding before your very eyes. Weatherford's wonderful poems, which have titles from Holiday's songbook, are so ...

like 454

Billie Holiday: Lady Day: The Master Takes and Singles & Rare Live Recordings 1934-1959

by Andrew Velez
April 6, 2008

Billie Holiday Lady Day--The Master Takes and Singles Columbia-Legacy 2007 Billie Holiday Rare Live Recordings 1934-1959 ESP-Disk 2007

The earliest 11 sides on Lady Day, a quartet box of discs taken from the Grammy Award-winning 10-CD box of 2001, are among the many cuts with pianist Teddy Wilson's orchestra. Only 20 ...

like 378

Billie Holiday: Billie Holiday: Rare Live Recordings 1934-1959

by Lyn Horton
February 12, 2008

The mystique associated with musical artists who have passed away often preoccupies those who continue to maintain an avid interest in the past of those musicians. A question to ask though is: how can anyone possibly know the internal perils and joys of these intriguing artistic beings? No matter how much research is done or how much listening occurs, there is an undeniable limit to what can be discussed or interpreted.

The release of Billie Holiday: Rare Live ...